Hope
by junkerey
Summary: Ducky learns of Maggie's death.
1. Chapter 1

"Ducky-"

Doctor Donald "Ducky" Mallard gave a slight shake of his head and raised one arthritic hand up in the air. The left edge of the metal on his glasses caught the sunlight as he inclined his head up to his taller companion, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, and Gibbs squinted slightly at the unexpected stab of light aimed itself into his eyes.

"Jethro," Ducky interrupted softly, "she lived a full live. And her death was not unexpected…" His voice faltered and he lowered his hand, then half-turned away as he scanned the courtyard, his attention seemingly distracted by the late summer foliage. "At least, it was not a surprise for her. She never bothered to share her medical background with me, of course, and how severe her condition was. But then again, why should she, after so many years apart?"

Gibbs gave a slight shrug. "Because you cared about each other?"

"We did," he acknowledged, "and I'm grateful for the time we shared. The time that she allowed me to share with her," he corrected himself slightly. "But one cannot simply walk back into another's life and expect to learn everything about them in a matter of a few weeks, can they? Such is the case here."

Gibbs watched as Ducky slowly stuck the folded piece of paper in his other hand back into his pocket. That simple email, from the London funeral home which handled Maggie Clarke's remains, had put a grim line where Ducky's mouth had been, and while he'd let Gibbs glance at it, he refused to let his longtime friend touch it. As soon as Gibbs had seen the necessary information, and Ducky could tell as much, the older man withdrew a few steps.

Gibbs sighed. "And I can tell you're not going over for the funeral."

Ducky let out a painful chuckle and turned back towards him. "You read me so well, Jethro. No, I will not be visiting the shores of my birth. Perhaps never again. I have nothing there for me. Haven't for some time, really. Mother is dead, Angus is dead, Maggie is dead. The remaining acquaintances that I did have are all retired, winding down their days on country estates or in care homes." He let out a slight hum-sigh. "Perhaps my time for reclining in leisure is approaching as well. Though I loathe the idea."

"I know you do." Gibbs put his hands on his hips. "You're like any specialist in their field. You want to keep your hand in the game, keep your mind sharp, and-"

"And ward off the evils of the outside world," Ducky interjected. "Distraction is my bedside companion, after all. It chases away the shadows of life along with the light. Love, for example. And age." He gave a distracted shake to his head. "I can't lie, Jethro. I'm feeling tired these days, and incidents like this," he said as he patted his pocket, "don't help me to shut out what my body is telling me, more persistently, every day."

"We won't be losing you yet, at any rate," Gibbs replied with a slight smile. "I've seen your schedule for the next few weeks."

"Idle hands," Ducky said as he cocked his head to one side. "I've not been one for services on a regular basis, as that was always Mother's interest, but perhaps Proverbs is not far off from the truth." He sighed again. "Now, if you don't mind, I do have the rest of the day off and I would like some time alone."

Gibbs rested one hand on his shoulder for a moment, gave it a quick squeeze, then walked off without a glance back.

Ducky slipped his hands in his pockets and watched him go with a slightly crooked smile on his thin lips.

_ It's times like these_, he thought, _that I'm grateful for years of friendship, to where no words are necessary._

The smile evaporated from his face as his fingers brushed against the folded white paper in his pocket, the standard 8.5" x 11" size that came out of the printers in the NCIS office- and pretty much everywhere else in America. In England, such a missive would have been printed off on A4, a slightly different size of paper by a few millimeters in either direction.

_Millimetres_, his mind corrected. There had been much about the U.K. that he'd had to readjust to, with the spellings of certain words and pronunciations and meanings (he'd long ago abandoned the habit of calling cigarettes "fags"), but he'd done it and with a certain amount of joy. He'd re-learned another version of the English language, essentially, and took a certain amount of pride in that. While he held on to his accent pretty well, he had spent enough time in the States to be able to shift to a more general West Coast dialect at will. But to do so struck him as pretentious, so he'd often force himself to "keep it limey," as it were (though he'd never dare use the word "limey" in public, either).

Ducky blinked several times and stepped over to a nearby bench, then sat down with his hands in his lap. He stared at the general activity of the courtyard, with agents and visitors crossing from one area to another, smoking, laughing, talking… engaged in life. Engaged in their _young_ lives. And what of Maggie and her body, wasted by age and disease, on a slab and destined to be buried in native soil? There would be no more warm summer afternoons for her, no more birds chirping in leafy trees to gaze at.

_Do I miss her? _Ducky asked himself. _Or, rather, have I ever not? Our one kiss in our youth was the only physical affection we'd ever shared_. _Yet…_

The meeting in London during the NCIS case had been brief, yet tender and satisfying. But further hope of time together had dissolved as she struggled to deal with her late husband's estate, then either found herself delayed by (or perhaps sought out) one reason after another as to why she could not move to the United States. Then the email came, and all hopes of resuming where they'd left off some fifty-five years earlier crumbled away to ash in Ducky's heart.

At least she had gone quickly, albeit after many years of battling the cancer that eventually took her life. Ducky found reassurance in that.

He turned his head and watched a woman in a suit as she took a long drag on her cigarette. His glance then flickered over to a man leaning against a wall, his fingers hooked under the collar of his jacket, smiling and laughing with several colleagues in the sun. He closed his eyes, then, and dropped his head.

_Perhaps I should have stayed in England. Perhaps I was selfish not to give up my life here for her benefit. If she truly meant that much to me, then it's her that I should have focused on, and not NCIS._

But he knew as well as anyone that old habits were hard to break. He'd found not only acceptance and a joy in his work at NCIS, but he'd found family- family beyond the choking love of Mother and her incessant little corgis, and a family unlike any biological one that he could have ever cobbled together with a love interest or wife. Could Maggie have been his wife, after so many years? Ducky doubted it. Again, if so, he would not have left London and separated himself from her, if he'd thought that the love he could get from her would in any way match that of his American family.

_Decisions have been made_, he thought to himself as he forced his tired body up from the bench. _I am here, perhaps until my dying day, alone and yet not alone. I suspect Maggie knew the feeling, as she had employees and friends and family of her own that made up for any holes in her own life._

He shuffled along the sidewalk and stuck his hands in his pockets, once again pressing his flesh against the paper. It would have been appropriate, he supposed, to visit and attend the funeral… and yet, he'd already envisioned the service several times over in his head, and the procession to the cemetery, and the visit to the grave. He'd seen it all so clearly that he even saw himself back at the hotel afterwards, tie off, collar open, black jacket lying on the bed and his stocking feet stuck out in front of him as he sipped a bottle of water and reminisced about that last night when he'd done two impossible things: he'd kissed Maggie, and he'd punched out Angus' two front teeth in a fight.

So why go back across the pond for such a dreary experience? Nothing would be gained from it. Gibbs knew that, too, even without asking as much.

_My only regret_, he realized, _is that I didn't take her to Paris for a day. The city for lovers. Surely, we could have given it a try?_

His steps grew more sure as his thoughts slipped into the fantasy of how such a trip might have been. As he envisioned them strolling along Paris streets, riding in cabs, enjoying meals in restaurants and, at last, dancing on a balcony overlooking the city at night, the last twinge of sadness slipped from his heart. By the time he reached the street, he heard himself whistling the tune of "La Vie en Rose," and wondering if, perhaps, love would still find him once again. He had the hope of it, anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

Ducky despised clichés, and yet by the end of the evening, he realized that the most trite of romantic statements applied to his situation.

He saw her across a crowded room.

True, the party had been getting rather boring for about an hour beforehand, and he had been looking around for some kind of distraction- a new face among the collection of familiar bodies, which had gathered for their annual medical conference in the Marriott in Bethesda- but he hadn't expected to find it.

And then… their eyes met.

_Cue the violins_, Ducky thought with a wry twist of his mouth. He glanced up at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, and the smile faded away.

She stood with one hand on the railing of a staircase and the other wrapped around the fragile stem of a mostly-ignored martini, her feet on the first step so that she could be on eye level with the group that she talked with. Her almost shocking gray eyes locked onto his for several minutes, and she gave a slight smile as she inclined her head slightly and looked away. Her shoulder-length black hair, dimmed by natural streaks of silver, brushed against her bare shoulders. And, as simple as that, Ducky found himself smitten.

It had been Jeanne who came and found him as the evening progressed, but to be fair, after a half-hour had passed, he'd begun to seek her out. He'd been temporarily distracted by a gushing admirer of his work, and then another joined in the conversation, otherwise he'd have gone up to her immediately. By the time the younger men moved on, Jeanne had left her perch on the stairwell and had begun to circulate among the convention-goers… somewhere. He'd felt something akin to relief when he'd turned around as a hand gently tapped him on the shoulder, and found himself looking at her again. The rest of the night passed as a comfortable blur, with her by his side.

She had been the one to suggest that they go to her hotel room, but he certainly hadn't protested.

Ducky reached down and turned off the hot-water tap where he'd just washed his hands, brushed a quick hand over the fly of his trousers to ensure that he'd closed it, then glanced back at his reflection.

_I am eighty-one years old_, he told himself. _She is perhaps in her early fifties. I daresay if she has anything more in mind than some cuddling and a few kisses, she's destined to be quite disappointed._

On the other side of the door, she waited for him in the hotel room, seated in one of the two chairs pulled up to a small circular table, upon which rested a half-full bottle of champagne. Ducky, however, did not feel trepidation and, if anything, the situation had stimulated his interest in her even more than he expected it to. Did she want to kiss him? Did she want him to hold her? He had no objections to intimacy, but it had been a while since he had allowed himself the opportunity. And the thirty-something age gap did bother him a bit, he had to admit.

_I'd hate for her to view me as some kind of lecherous, opportunistic playboy_, he thought. His shoulders tensed. _True enough, I have had that reputation in the past, but I'm rather past the point where it is an appropriate mantle to carry around._

With a slow, deep breath, he walked over to the bathroom door, turned the knob and opened the door… only to find her no longer in the chair.

A little alarmed, Ducky swung his head around and did a quick scan of the space as he stepped into the room. She lay on the bed, under the covers- her bare shoulders showing above the sheet that she'd tucked around her chest, only he doubted very much that she still wore the cocktail dress underneath the sheet. He stopped in his tracks and stared at her, his mouth partway open in mild surprise.

Jeanne released a soft laugh and tucked her hands behind her head, her shapely arms and slender elbows in the air as she sank back into the pillow.

"Ducky," she said, "we're both too old to play around about what we want."

Ducky forced out a small laugh of his own. "In my case," he replied as he sat on the bed next to her, "I fear that is literally the case. There's not much that a man of my years can offer you on this particular item of furniture, you know. 'The spirit is willing…'"

Jeanne studied him for a moment, blinked a few times, then lowered her arms and took his left hand. "Doctor," she informed him, "rest assured that I want nothing more from you than you are capable, and willing, to give. Just… be with me for a while. Let's see what happens."

"Hopefully, not another heart attack," Ducky joked. He sighed, looked away, then looked back into Jeanne's eyes and sighed again. "Oh, what the hell," he muttered as he tugged at his bowtie with his right hand. The cloth came loose in his hands and he pulled it free from his collar, then tossed it aside.

Jeanne sat up and put her hands on his shoulder, then gave him a gentle kiss on the cheek.

"Thank you," she whispered into his ear.

"No," he replied gently. "Thank _you_. For coming for me earlier."

She gave him a mischievous wink. "Your turn."

Ducky undid the top two buttons of his shirt, then turned and took her into his arms.


End file.
